Pirouettes

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We’ve covered the Atlantic series By Heart a number of timesbefore. It features notable authors writing about their favorite passages. In the latest edition, Mary-Beth Hughespicks out a paragraph from Penelope Fitzgerald’sThe Blue Flower, about a poet who’s trying to cope with grief. Sample quote: “Reading Fitzgerald, I felt it was possible to write as I’d experienced dancing.”

Thomas Beckwith
is a staff writer for The Millions and an MFA candidate at Johns Hopkins. Prior to coming to Baltimore, he studied literature and worked in IT while living in Dublin, Ireland. You can find him on Twitter at @tdbeckwith.

"Why are people so preoccupied? What is genre in the first place? Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?" Kazuo Ishiguro and Neil GaimandiscussThe Buried Giant, fantasy and genre for the New Statesman. Pair with our own Lydia Kiesling's review of the novel.

“Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.” Alexandra AlterinterviewsSalman Rushdie about his brand-new novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.

New York Times travel editor Monica Drakerecounts visiting Antigua after reading Jamaica Kincaid’sA Small Place—a sharp critique of tourism and the colonialist narrative around the island. As she puts it, “For all the drama of its history, [...] the beauty of the place, the very thing that bewitches its tourists, renders it a time capsule to its residents.”

Even though the new Franzen doesn't drop for another week, for many readers, today is the biggest book release day of the summer thanks to the publication of Mockingjay, the third installment of Suzanne Collins' blockbuster Hunger Games trilogy. For those less inclined toward young adult fare, Kevin Guilfoile's new novel The Thousand is now out, as is The Cross of Redemption, the "uncollected writings" of James Baldwin.